• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Humans Have Had Language For At Least 135,000 Years

March 17, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

The genetic hardware that gave rise to humanity’s unique language capabilities first emerged at least 135,000 years ago, when all Homo sapiens still lived in one unbroken tribe. As this original group later split into a multitude of regional populations, the shared capacity for verbal and symbolic communication may have facilitated the development of modern human behavior and culture by around 100,000 years ago.

ADVERTISEMENT

Although our species has been on the planet for around 230,000 years – or perhaps even longer – the emergence of funerary practices, artwork, and other complex behaviors only became widespread at some point in the last 65,000 years or so. Anthropologists refer to this global cultural revolution as the “great leap forward”, yet there is currently no consensus on what triggered the process.

Seeking to unearth the roots of our cognitive and behavioral complexity, the authors of a new study note that “the 7,000 or so languages in the world today share striking similarities in the ways in which they are constructed phonologically, syntactically, and semantically.” This suggests that every single human population shares the same underlying capacity for language, which means that this ability must have evolved before the first Homo sapiens community started to divide.



“It follows that, if we can identify when the first division occurred, we can with reasonable certainty consider that date to define the lower boundary of when human language was present in the ancestral modern human population,” write the researchers. “Genomic studies of early H. sapiens population broadly agree that the first division from the original stem is represented today by the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa,” they add.

Analyzing data from 15 separate genetic studies, the authors determined that the initial division giving rise to the Khoisan occurred roughly 135,000 years ago. They therefore conclude that the development of language capabilities must precede this date, even if complex written and verbal communication systems had not yet been invented.

“At present, we cannot go back further to pinpoint the date by which language itself emerged,” they write. “What we can do is to look forward and see how, subsequent to 135 [thousand years ago], language may have had a direct hand in shaping modern human behaviors.”

For instance, the researchers note that “modern human behaviors such as body decoration and the production of ochre pieces with symbolic engravings appeared as normative and persistent behaviors around [100,000 years ago].” In other words, there appears to be a 35,000-year gap between the genetic origin of our linguistic capabilities and the widespread establishment of modern behavior.

ADVERTISEMENT

According to the study authors, this is a reasonable amount of time to allow for the development and spread of symbolic communication, thus suggesting that language may have been the key factor driving the “great leap forward”.

“We believe that the time lag implied between the lower boundary of when language was present […] and the emergence of normative modern human behaviors across the population suggests that language itself was the trigger that transformed nonlinguistic early H. sapiens (who nonetheless already possessed ‘language-ready’ brains acquired at the origin of the anatomically distinctive species) into the symbolically-mediated beings familiar today,” write the researchers.

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Skype alumni head to court in a battle over Starship Technologies and Wire
  2. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  3. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So
  4. Lacking Company, A Dolphin In The Baltic Is Talking To Himself

Source Link: Humans Have Had Language For At Least 135,000 Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The World’s Oldest Known Cake Is Over 4,000 Years Old, And It Sounds Pretty Delicious
  • An Ominous Haze Lurks Over The Deadliest Volcano In US, But USGS Says A Repeat Of 1980 Isn’t Coming
  • Hayabusa2’s Target Asteroid Is 4 Times Smaller Than Thought – Can It Still Touch Down On It?
  • In 2011, Slavc The Wolf Journeyed 1,000 Miles To Begin Verona’s First Wolf Pack In 100 Years
  • Anyone Know What These Marine “Y-Larvae” Grow Into? Because Scientists Have No Clue
  • C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) Closest Earth Approach Is Next Month – Will We See It With The Naked Eye?
  • In 2013, A Volcanic Eruption Wiped Out Life On This Remote Island. Then, Somehow, Plants Reemerged
  • 1-Year-Old Orca Takes Out A Big Fat Seal In This Award-Winning – And Extremely Badass – Photo
  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version